Pokemon is one of the most popular media franchises in the world. Started in the 1990s in Japan as what translates to “Pocket Monsters,” the series’ contents consist of people capturing animal-like Pokemon, training them, and battling them against one another.
Pokemon became one of the most popular video game franchises, as well, through the 1990s and each of the decades since. The series’ first release of video games in the United States, Pokemon Red, Blue, and Gold for the Nintendo GameBoy, were some of the most-played video games of their time, too.
Many of us remember playing Pokemon in our younger years. According to researchers at Stanford University, people who played significantly more Pokemon video games than their counterparts as children throughout the 1990s are more likely to have a tiny region of the brain where information like the appearance of each individual Pokemon is stored.
A peer-reviewed paper that was recently published by Nature, an academic journal, consisted of an analysis of the brains of people who are now adults who self-reported as having played “a lot of Pokemon in their childhood,” roughly between the years of 1995 to 1998.
The Stanford University researchers were able to find out about the area of the brain by taking scans of the aforementioned Pokemon-a-holics’ brains when they were exposed to Pokemon-related stimuli from the first three original GameBoy games. Although not all the study’s participants shared the exact same region of the brain that was so responsive to Pokemon, the majority of them did share the space.
Without going into deep detail about how the phenomenon is thought to work, the info is stored in the specific region of the brain because of how small Pokemon appeared to massive fans of the game when it was on GameBoy in the 1990s.
The study also found that many of the avid Pokemon fans shared multiple areas of the brain in which there were likely to be higher concentrations of grey matter, which is a type of brain material that isn’t very valuable.
The results of this study are significant because researchers have known for decades that people share the same regions of the brain when it comes to walking, talking, and expressing emotions, alongside many other major brain functions. Harvard Medical School found out that, at least for monkeys, people needed to play from a very early age in order to have a high likelihood of sharing similar brain regions.
Dil Bole Oberoi
